The Himalayan Arc

by Namita Gokhale

  One time the child king went to a dove fight in some Brahmin’s house at Bamon Leikai and he stayed out carousing the whole night, forgetting to come home. My mother, the Lady Ngangbam, reported the matter to the elder prince. He set out immediately, truncheon in hand, for the Brahmin’s house by Thanga Moat. When they heard that the elder prince had come, everyone fled, scattering every which way. The child king went into hiding. I wonder, did he perhaps hide in the bed of the Brahmin’s wife? It was said that some of the slower attendants got a good beating. So that was Raja Dumbrasingh.

  The consort of the elder prince Dumbrasingh was a Maid of Chongtham. She was the older sister, born right before the Lady Chongtham. So surely the Lady Chongtham must have been familiar with the palace from an early age. She must surely have met the child king, the younger brother of Dumbrasingh, her brother-in-law. Dumbrasingh’s consort, the Maid of Chongtham, died early, leaving behind three children. The widower Dumbrasingh did not take another wife for a long time. And so the Queen Mother took his children Noyonsana, Bhaskar Manisana, and Sanatombi, these three, into the palace and brought up her motherless grandchildren. It was said that they even called their grandmother ‘Mother’. So Tampak might have been closer to the child king through her sister. We did not know much at the time as we were children then. It is only now that I understand this.

  Of all our mothers, we were drawn most to our mother the Maid of Chongtham. What we admired most about her was her black tresses that reached below her knees. The Lady Tampak was famous in the palace for her beauty. She was fair like a champak flower, tall and well proportioned. Had she been alive today, Tampak might have been crowned a beauty queen for the Longest Tresses, Best Complexion or Shapeliest Figure.

  Today my efforts have borne fruit. The inspiration my mother Tampak has given me has become the prologue to the stories of Maharaja Churachand’s vast household.

  Manipur came under foreign rule in 1891. After the British took over Manipur, Kangla — the seat of the kings of Manipur — became the property of a foreign nation6. Though the British, after much deliberation, proclaimed Churachand the king of Manipur at the age of eight, the child king Churachand never got to reside in the Kangla. A new palace was constructed at the old Rajbari, a vast stretch of land at Nongmeibung. It is said that Lord Govinda7 was installed in the new palace and, as required by tradition, a proper palace was built with royal offices and the like. The king’s entire family lived here. All alliances and marriages of the queens took place here as did the births of most of the princes and princesses.

  At our first glimmer of awareness, my sovereign father was at the height of splendour, reigning in the new grand palace we know today that was built at Gurulampak8. It is said that the palace was constructed by Major Maxwell9, an engineer who had been appointed after the annexation of Manipur. Six of Maharaja Churachand’s children – I was one of the six – were born in the new palace. We were Princess Wangol, Prince Joy, Prince Kheda, Princess Radha, Princess Sanatombi and Prince Maipak. Prince Maipak was the youngest child of my father. He was too young to know anything when our father passed away.

  When I was growing up, plays had begun to be staged in Manipur. As I later heard, The Killing of King Kangsa10 was performed on a stage built in the performance hall at the Lord Govinda temple the day I was born. When my sovereign father heard of the impending delivery, he ran to the royal delivery room. But the Lady Ngangbam was heartbroken, the king was heartbroken: I was their fifth daughter.

  In those times, plays were performed very regularly at my sovereign father’s palace as he was also a patron of theatre. I remember sitting in my uncle Nathasana’s lap (he was advocate Manisana’s father), watching the palace performance of Narasingh, though I did not watch it all. I fell asleep. But this I do remember, that the strapping and handsome man who played Narasingh was Khomdram Dhanachandra. The part of Gambhirsingh was played by a man called Chingakham Angoubi, known as Member Mayurdhwaja. I came to know this later. It is said that my cousin Irabot11 also took part in this play. Interestingly enough, the men who took the main roles were all cousins, married to the daughters of the older brothers of my sovereign father. The play Narasingh was written by Lairenmayum Ibungohal. Oja12 Lairenmayum Ibungohal was a pundit and also the aide-de-camp to my father. He was my teacher and he told me a lot of stories from history and of the palace.

  I also saw my cousin Irabot in a play. To this day, people tell the story of the time when he appeared in a play and he rushed around madly in the role of a delinquent, crying, ‘Two hundred rupees! Two hundred rupees!’ and of Maharaja Churachand saying, ‘Here, here is your two hundred rupees!’ and flinging it at him. But what is disappointing is that there is no road named after him, nothing that honours the name of the artist Irabot. So be it. My narrative seems to be becoming one about my discontents. Yet, I have set out to write about some of the achievements of the royal reign of Maharaja Churachand. I wonder, will I be able to do it? The more I search, the further the horizons seem to recede.

  We grew up in a large and exceptional family. It was a household where the traditional and modern elements of Anglo–Manipur came together. We were never taken out without chandan marks13 on our faces, but the clothes we were dressed in were those of English children: shoes, socks and woollen clothes imported from England. At the time two English ladies, Miss Wood and Mrs. E.M. Jolly, were employed as companions to my mother, the Lady Ngangbam, in order to instruct her in British etiquette. Although my eldest sisters Tamphasana and Tombiyaima14 did not go to school, they were highly educated – they knew the poems of Wordsworth and other poets. It is said that even the officers of the palace went to my sisters when they ran into difficulties with the English language. My sister Tombiyairna in particular became a very well educated woman for her time. She started collecting books to start a library. My sovereign father gave the money for it. And so, though my sovereign father sent his sons to England for their studies, it cannot be said that he neglected his daughters. We were given lessons in horse riding. We were taught how to shoot. My sister Angousana learned to play tennis very well. I witnessed my father teaming up with her to play doubles occasionally. She went along on hunting shikars, dressed in men’s clothes. These were then the daughters of Maharaja Churachand.

  Truth to tell, our lives as children were very happy. We went to all the royal offices and looked around the rooms. We went to the infirmary and picked up little bottles. The empty grounds and gardens guarded by Lord Govinda were our playground. We haunted the royal quarters of our mothers all the time. But we were not usually allowed to go into the rooms of our elder sisters. Perhaps because we were likely to touch things. But we huddled in the doorway, hoping we might be called in.

  EMBASSY

  Janice Pariat

  It was a corpse-cold evening in mid-December when Josephine broke his heart. The sky was the colour of razor blades, lying flat and square outside the window and slivered delicately between the branches of bare trees. The air both numbed and sharpened his senses, froze and shaped his breath. In his ears was the echo of her silence when he asked about Ashley, the Anglo boy from the neighbourhood next to theirs, the boy with the blue-grey eyes who played the guitar like Slash.

  ‘Lal said he saw you with him last week, and yesterday. Just tell me the truth, Jo…’

  And in her own way, he supposed she had. First she laughed about it and treated it all as a joke. Then she denied ever being with Ashley in the chai shop – or maybe she’d joined him once, but it didn’t mean anything, and surely Tei would not be the sort to begrudge her a cup of tea with an acquaintance. Finally, she lapsed into sullen silence, as though it were all his fault for bringing this up. That things were otherwise alright, and he’d gone and disturbed the peace.

  ‘Just tell me the truth…’ he pleaded.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she snapped at one point. ‘What truth? Whose truth?’

  It was very simple, he said, did she want to be with Ashley or with him?
/>   And when she kept quiet, he knew.

  He walked aimlessly for a while, pacing the sloping streets of his locality until he reached the bustle of Laitumkhrah. The pavements were crowded with evening shoppers and local vegetable sellers stocked with sheaves of mustard leaves. A crowd of youngsters buzzed around the aloo-muri man at Police Point; they stood with banana-leaf bowls, laughing loudly and eyeing each other with interest. Further down the main road, he saw a group of friends turn into a jadoh stall for chai and conversation. Any other evening, he would have joined them, but today he walked swiftly past. Only when he reached Don Bosco Square did he realize what he wanted was a drink. He debated over taking a taxi – the roads were clogged to bursting with traffic – and decided to walk to Police Bazaar instead. Maybe it would warm him up. Perhaps it would clear the pain, and stop thoughts of Josephine running through his head like a madly looped tape. Also, he would save on taxi fare. That twenty bucks would buy him an extra drink. It would keep him warmer than the arms he’d never find himself in again.

  After he navigated Jacob’s Ladder, a long flight of narrow, slippery stairs that led to the bottom of Don Bosco Hill, he walked briskly by Ward’s Lake and the main post office building. Eventually, he strode down the sloping So So Tham Roadtowards Khyndai Lad junction, a pulsating heart of people and traffic. From here, spreading out in long, grasping fingers, were seedy, unlit streets, each an accomplished specialist in various nocturnal offerings, from the medically urgent to the dubious and debauched. Keating Road on the left came to life after the liquor stores in town had closed. It was lined with makeshift stalls that sold alcohol ‘in black’ alongside perfectly legal yet deleterious deep-fried prawns packed in greasy newspaper. On the right was Jail Road whose genteel bakeries and music shops gave way to a dkhar vegetable market and rows of sweet shops that smelled perpetually of rose water and ghee. Running parallel to this was Quinton Road whose one major landmark was the blue-and-white Eight Sisters Hotel – a name which, as everyone joked, referred less to the states in Northeast India than the number of whores you could pay to have in your bed at the same time. Along Glory’s Plaza Road, where Tei was now walking, these working women stood outside Payal Cinema, their bodies carefully preened and positioned. ‘Come-hither’ their hips and hands beckoned, while their eyes darted through the crowd, sharp and knowing. The men they smiled at were the ones they picked as potentials; they could tell, even from a distance, those who were the slightest bit interested or intrigued. Even though he hadn’t ever paid for a woman before, for a moment Tei was tempted – an image flashed in his mind of Josephine and Ashley, together,doing the things she’d allowed him to do to her, on her bed, on his sofa, on their long drives to the countryside of Kyrdemkulai. The world roared in his ears. He wanted to be with someone as revenge, as redressal for betrayal. Maybe all he needed to get Josephine off his mind was a good, hard fuck.

  Something must have shown on his face – if not the keen edge of desire then something lonely and desperate – for a woman smiled at him and moved closer. She was wearing a silky, shiny blue top and a long black skirt; over this she’d draped a red-and-white jaiñkyrshah.

  ‘Want a good time?’ she asked in Khasi. Unlike most of the others, her mouth wasn’t stained scarlet by kwai or khaini, and her lips were full and plump. She had a roundness that he suddenly felt a lust for – voluptuous arms and thighs that he imagined entwined around him, his fingers sinking into her flesh.

  ‘How much?’ he asked, his voice raspy in nervousness. If anyone he knew, or someone who knew his parents, saw him…

  Her smile widened. He could see the tip of her plump red tongue, its infinite wetness.

  ‘Depends on what you want … but why don’t we decide on that later.’ She reached for his hand – he could see her bitten fingernails, the braceleted wrist – and at the touch of her skin, something like a splash of icy water hit him at the back of his head. What was he doing? It had vanished, his nerve, his bravado, the inkling of lust, and all that remained was a wretched emptiness.

  ‘Next time,’ he said, feeling embarrassed, but she already knew, and had already lost interest, her eyes once again searching the crowd.

  He walked briskly on, awash with self-reproach, and, in an attempt to assuage the guilt, stopped to drop a coin for the blind duitara player on the sidewalk. The narrow street was lined with food sellers and their shaky wooden carts strung with gas lamps and burners that shed dusty, hazy pools of light into the evening. It all looked appealing – chillies stuffed with potato and mint, brinjal fried in gram flour batter, noodles tossed in fatty pork bits, boiled eggs halved and sprinkled with pepper and fresh coriander – but he was in a hurry. His thirst was stronger now.

  Bisesh, the chiselled-face Nepali chap at the counter, nodded as Tei walked in. Everyone knew Bisesh only spoke to regulars. Most of the time he behaved as though he owned this place. He didn’t; some Marwari man did, but he wasn’t usually at the bar. Shillong was safe now for outsiders to own businesses, but not that safe. Merely twenty years ago streets rang with the cries of ‘beh dkhar’. Memories, in cases like these, were long and warily forgiving. It was best to keep behind the scenes like an elusive puppeteer. Hence, even if Embassy had changed hands a hundred times, from one dkhar to another, nobody inside knew; most, of course, were in no state to care. The place looked the same as it had when it first opened in the mid-’60s – two rectangular rooms that echoed like empty tombs, joined by short, stubby steps, filled with rows of wooden tables, and on the ceiling, long-stemmed fans that blossomed like tragic flowers. Here, people drenched their grief in alcohol, and stashed their dreams behind the familiar, flimsy darkness that smelled faintly dank and sour, the odour of defeat.

  Tei looked around, over the crowd of heads, and for a moment his intention wavered – he’d come for a drink, but there wasn’t a single table free. He stood undecided for a moment, he didn’t know of another place he could go to in Police Bazaar – the bar in the fancy hotel on the main road was excruciatingly expensive, and all the cheap alcohol joints near his neighbourhood in Laitumkhrah had been closed by order of the Seng Kynthei, a local woman’s organization aiming to eliminate (what they considered) vice and immorality in town. Damn them, he cursed silently. There was always the option, he supposed, of buying a bottle and drinking it on the sidewalk, like so many others did. Then again, there was the danger ofsomeone he knew walking by … his musing was interrupted by a rumble of slurry voices calling him over. The drinkers were in an amiable mood tonight, and more than that, could recognize a thirsting, despairing soul. Hey, bro, they beckoned, join us. Ei, shong hangne. And from a dark corner, a single word – ‘Teiskem’ – someone who knew his name.

  From that distance, Tei couldn’t make out the man’s face. It might have been anyone. Yet, even as he approached the table, he couldn’t place him. It was a face that wasn’t uncommon, marked by the singular weariness that settled over everyone’s features in a town landlocked by more than towering mountains. Somewhere, the light shifted, a shadow moved, Tei caught the highlight of his nose, the familiar eyes, and a name snapped into place like a cocked gun.

  ‘Mama Lang?’ he asked to be sure.

  The man replied by lifting his glass and knocking back the remaining liquor. Then he waved Tei to an empty chair. His large hands were knotted and gnarled, rough as tree bark, inflicted by a steady tremor. He probably wouldn’t be swift and nimble enough to make kites like he used to, thought Tei. Mama Lang’s kites flew the highest in the locality, and his mynja, string dipped in shards of powdered glass, was the toughest to cut in a mid-air fight.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Tei taking a seat.

  ‘You look the same,’ said Mama Lang, pouring out two generous measures of whisky. Tei couldn’t possibly say that about him. A decade ago, Lang was good-looking, in his mid-twenties, but now he was an old man. His eyes settled on nothing in particular and flickered like dark moths around a bare bulb, his skin, puffy and pale, hung on his face like a
cheap wrinkled suit.

  ‘What brings you here?’ he slurred; the smell of stale alcohol clung to his breath, pungent and strong.

  Tei drew back, a little uncomfortable, a little repulsed. He couldn’t believe this was the same person he’d looked up to as a kid. The one who taught him how to win at marbles, construct a sturdy kali het to joy-ride down the neighbourhood slopes, to fly kites with a quick, confident hand.

  ‘Still staying in Laban?’ Mama Lang peered at him over the rim of his glass. The golden liquid sparkled in the dim light.

  Tei shook his head. ‘We moved … ten years ago. To Nongrim.’

  To a better part of town, less rough, less poor. Away from the riff-raff as his mother used to say.

  ‘That’s why I don’t see you any more.’ Mama Lang chuckled good-naturedly. The drinks were going down particularly well this evening.

  ‘And you still fly kites?’ Mama Lang scrambled on the table for the matchbox. Tei pushed it across with a finger.

  ‘I work.’ In the agriculture department … as a special rural development officer. His parents were particularly proud. It was so difficult to get a government job these days. At least without a decent number of contacts in all the right places, and they’d only been in touch with a distant cousin who said he would help but it all depended on how Tei conducted himself at the interview.

  ‘Where?’

  Tei told him.

  Mama Lang tilted his head and howled like a wolf at the moon. Tei almost spilled his whisky in alarm. A few of the other drinkers turned around and told him to shut up or they’d have him thrown out. He stopped and said, ‘Good, good. That’s what we fought for. To give our Khasi youth employment and opportunity.’ He hiccuped and gulped his drink to subdue it.